Hands up who has a boss who doesn’t really understand social media?

Or maybe your boss gets Facebook, or maybe gets Twitter like Donald Trump does, but uses their own personal experience of one to define how others might experience it?

That can be a fairly common problem for all communicators, but the bigger question is how do you explain the nature of new media/digital media to such a boss in ways that help you make a case for being able to best use it in your work.

I can put my hand up for having worked with bosses who saw the agency being criticized by organised Facebook groups, and whose first response was: “We need our own Facebook page to counter these claims.”

And yet such bosses are never likely to respond to being criticised in the Australian newspaper or on television, by saying, “We need our own newspaper or TV channel to counter this.”

The fact the criticisms were being made on Facebook is not the real thing to be focusing on. Of more concern is that the criticisms are being made by an organised group. In this instance, Facebook is just the channel for the group’s issues.

It’s true, as Marshall McLuhan said in the 1960s that the medium is the message – but sometimes you need to not confuse one for the other.

And hand’s up whose boss has decided you need a Youtube channel because – well because… and then is disappointed at the number of visits you are getting – noticing it’s a lot less than many teenage girl’s makeup tutorials or young dude’s game walk-throughs?

Because the world is waiting for one more YouTube channel or Facebook page like it is waiting for one more garage-recorded heavy metal song, or like it is waiting for one more self-published Amazon book.

It doesn’t matter how good your stuff is if people can’t find you in a highly crowded market. Or if only your friends and colleagues are visiting you.

The conversation with your boss (or let’s face it, with yourself sometimes) needs to focus on what you actually want to get from using digital media. For it can be many different things, and you need to often think of it as many things.

It can be a channel, or it can be a place for multiple messages, or a place for feeling the mood of an audience, or a place for conversations with people, or all of these and more.

Effectively understanding the language and use of digital media has been compared to learning a second language. And there are:

• those who have been born into speaking it (digital natives),
• those who have learned to speak it really well even though it was not their native language (digital migrants), and
• those who never fully get it and don’t speak it very well at all (digital tourists).

 

These are not necessarily age-related categories, though they do tend to favour age categorization, with the digital natives being younger and the digital tourists being much older. So before getting into a heated conversation with your boss over the use of any digital media great idea he or she might have, first seek to understand what their level of fluency is and work around that, not against that.

Sometimes the right response to a boss saying we need a [insert random digital media thing], is to say, “No, we actually need a boss who understands digital media.” But it’s more likely to be more appropriate to say, “No we actually need a communication strategy that starts with clear objectives and use that to define the mediums and messages we should best use.”

Data Trivia

Feature your data and/or visual stories and findings. If you have some data trivia that reveals an answer or poses a question that you would like to share, please email editor@asc.asn.au

The following Data Trivia has been submitted by Ravindra Palavalli-Nettimi, PhD student, Macquarie University.

Is summer the best time for communicating about ants?

Google trends analyses suggest so. Northern hemisphere countries like Canada and the US have a peak in the search term “ant” during their summer, while Australia has a peak in the Australian summer.

More ant activity in summer means more Googling about ants. So we need more ant content during summer to raise awareness and to spread knowledge.

The full story can be found here.

Suggestions for future trivia:

http://www.radicalcartography.net/?utm_content=bufferec7a3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Written by: Ravi, ASC Web Editor

By Ravindra Palavalli-Nettimi, PhD student, Macquarie University, 2017 grant recipient.

One course, 6300 words, and 2 papers.

I was awarded one of the Australian Science Communicators professional development grants last year to take a scientific writing and editing course offered by Dr. Malini Devadas. I am happy to share with you that since I started the e-course, I have been able to revise a paper and submit it, and have written another paper to be submitted soon.

The course was unique and very handy for me at the right time of my PhD thesis writing. It was an eight-week course with short video tutorials and worksheets. It was not just about the actual writing, but also about navigating different stages of writing a paper. The course also gave me access to an exclusive Facebook group consisting of other students taking the course.

I found some of Malini’s tips very useful in the process of writing of papers—especially on planning, revising and copyediting. Here are a few things I learned in the course:

1. Spend time thinking about what your main result is.
2. Plan each paragraph. Write a sentence summarising each of them, and expand on it later.
3. Do not edit while you are writing.
4. Take a break from your paper for at least a week before you revise.
5. Revise to make your sentences succinct and remove redundancy.
6. Copyediting is often neglected (at least I did). But make sure you check punctuation, syntax, and use a consistent/appropriate style for the journal you are writing. For instance, some journals want x% as opposed to x %, or similarly, >x or > x—some details that often get overlooked.

You know the feeling when you realise you have learned to do something more clearly and better than before. I had that feeling about writing the papers. Thanks to the ASC and Malini for this opportunity and a learning experience.